Porridge

Diamonds or Snow – T.S.J. Harling

Image by Alex Avalos, via Unsplash This is the place you go to bury or burn the person you love. – You are in a cinema with friends, or a boyfriend, or your family. No-one is ill, no-one is cross, and you have enough money to waste on a cinema ticket and popcorn and fizzy…

An Ode to Cross-Dressing – Clara Schwarz

I tightly pull back my hair into a slick, low bun, parted far on the right side of my skull. With a several pumps of hairspray, I even out the edges and create a stiff look. I squeeze the top button through its hole and stand up straight as I clip the bow into its…

ONE POEM – Sarah Degner Riveros

Mama hugs
her son. Can we get
horchata? No. Not today.
It’s Tuesday. Treinta tacos?
De asada? Para llevar.
The wait’s worth it.

COMFORT FOODS // Cutlets – V.M. Braganza

Cutlets (also called potato chops), much like my family and their language, resist any attempt at tidy or singular classification.

You die if you worry – Robert Scott

You die if you worry, die if you don’t. I laughed the first time he said it. I hadn’t heard it before.

Pero’s Promise – Tamara Lazaroff

At the village bus stand, with my packed bags, I’m crying my eyes out as I kiss the faces of the row of relatives—Uncle Mitko, Beti, Verka, Tanja, Mirka, even Baba Slobodanka who Branko has carried on his back. Others, too. They’ve all come to say goodbye before I go back home to Australia. And…

ONE POEM – Hideko Sueoka

Carnivorous Butterwort A pale-purple tint – a sort of violet of little petals attracting flies, ants in fresh beeches shading the zigzag trail with glossy moss. The floral colour implies saintly piety to God or deities at which an insect could quail in the East. Ecru moths cruise and scurry. Near Acheron just a halt….

ONE POEM – SJ Valiquette

writing a love letter to the ocean is as singing an aria to a hurricane:
there is nothing in language for this.

ONE POEM – Juliette Sebock

I wonder what will happen
if I make it
to twenty-five.

One Book: What Would You Save From Being Destroyed for Ever? – Hunter Liguore

If all the books in the world were being burned in a fire and you had the chance to save just one, what book would you save? For some this might be an easy answer; for others, this question might need the utmost consideration—as an avid book reader, with piles of books lining all corners…

ONE POEM – Elden Morrow

It is June and the foxgloves are in bloom.
In two days it shall be my birthday.

ONE POEM – Louise McStravick

Make the water rearrange its insides,
shift shape as it is told,
steam rise
drip drip vinegar,
sour the water to not let things stick.

COMFORT FOODS // My Mother’s Sweet Halwa — Sheena Hussain

The pots and pans of childhood stir me.

TWO POEMS – Elizabeth Stott

We made the heads of Styrofoam
so not to be too heavy on their frail necks.
Hearts? Simply-fashioned, from lumps of stone.

On Appearance: Disordered eating and the body, Kelsey Osgood’s ‘How to Disappear Completely’, and how language makes illness appear to us — Lizzie Hudson

An exploration of the impact of literature about eating disorders on readers. TW: Discussion of eating disorders and self harm.

ONE POEM – Katherine Fallon

Finding them dead on returning from vacation,
she flushed her six African Cichlids.

ONE POEM – Jonathan Chadwick

The last three nights, I dreamt I was a sail
Lifted, swept and thumped from here to there.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Circus – David Rodríguez

“There’s a certain sort of artifice in my work and the way I use light and scenes because my lighting creates a kind of dreamscape.”

ONE POEM – Elizabeth Wilson Davies

The unconsidered diaries of family life fall open at once favourite recipes,
bittersweet imprints on the page of stained, smeared, sticky memories.

Smälting Pot – Elinor Potts

Bellies lined with pyttipanna, we refill our water bottles and stride home from the city centre towards Block 5.

ONE POEM – Poppy Frean

listen
words pass overhead
spoken broken in dialogue slang where South
is said “SOUF”

COMFORT FOODS // While You’re Still Here – Yasmine Jessy Amr

You scribble on a piece of paper, pausing every two minutes to remember. Your memory isn’t what it used to be. But you try anyway.

ONE POEM – Ogedengbe Tolulope

We sing the songs filled with sadness,
Songs with lyrics written in silence

Bettina von Arnim Accuses Me of Unfaithfulness – Charles Haddox

I dreamt one night about a bright-eyed young woman with dark hair who accused me of being unfaithful to her. Her accusations were apparently true, which troubled me deeply after I awoke. I had never been unfaithful to anyone but had myself suffered the pain of betrayal once or twice when I was young. I…

TWO POEMS — Miriam Gauntlett

any blotched greenery has
the potential to burst
forth into flower.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Tales of a City VII – Seigar

Nobody knows, but I sometimes fantasise about what my partner’s childhood and teen years were like… I feel a great tenderness when I explore this town

ONE POEM – Peter Hebden

Tuesday
morning with no people, no cars
only today there are no people,
no cars. Today it’s weird, isn’t it?

Choice Feminism and Imagination: the representation of women in Disney – Beth O’Brien

The concept of choice feminism operates under the principle that any decision made by a woman has the potential to be a feminist choice, so long as it was made with political consciousness.[1] However, the political and social theorist, Steven Lukes, argues that an individual’s actions are guided by what they can imagine to…

Email to Hannah – Catherine Madden

Today I woke up slightly ill and with a sense of nostalgia that was only just bearable.

F*ck Cancer: Fighting the Odds in 21st Century America – Leah Mueller

No one is ever prepared for these dreaded words: your husband’s got cancer. I should have known, but I didn’t. For months, my husband Russ complained of muscle weakness, nausea, blood in his stools, and dizziness. His new primary care provider, a man lauded by his young receptionist as a “genius”, said, “If you…